Definition
A Law French term meaning to drive back or repel. In its historical legal usage, rechaser described the act of forcibly turning back a person or animal — most commonly encountered in medieval English common law contexts involving trespass, chase, or the rights of pursuit across land. The term appears in the Year Books and reflects the feudal-era vocabulary used by pleaders in the courts of common law before Law French gave way to English legal discourse.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): No entry. The term does not appear in modern general dictionaries.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): No entry. The term was already archaic by the nineteenth century and does not appear in general English dictionaries of that period.
Editorial note: Rechaser is pure Law French legal vocabulary with no surviving common-language counterpart. It entered the Year Books as a technical term of pleading and never passed into ordinary English usage. Researchers encountering it should treat it as a term of art requiring legal-historical context rather than linguistic intuition.
Common Confusion
Rechaser should not be confused with rechase, the action noun describing the same driving-back event, or with the broader right of chase (the franchise entitling a lord to hunt game across defined territory). The term describes the defensive or responsive act of repulsion — driving something back — not the original pursuit. Conflating rechaser with the pursuing action reverses its directional meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively a Year Book term. Researchers will encounter it in plea rolls, abridgments, and treatises drawing on Year Book authority — particularly in actions touching on rights of chase, trespass quare clausum fregit, and the defence of close. Its appearance signals that the source is working directly from Law French pleading records or a digest of them.
Practical traps: Because rechaser is not indexed in most modern legal reference works, full-text searching in digitized Year Book collections is the most reliable discovery path. Variant spellings in manuscript sources (rechaser, rechacier, and related forms) reflect the unstable orthography of Law French and can cause searches to miss relevant passages.
The term also serves as a jurisdictional and temporal marker. Its presence in a source strongly suggests English common law material from the medieval period, most likely before the mid-seventeenth century displacement of Law French from the courts. It will not appear in American legal sources except as a historical citation to English authority.
Corpus connections: Researchers working on franchise rights, manorial law, game law, or the history of trespass doctrine will find rechaser at the intersection of property and tort history. It connects to the broader vocabulary of chase and hunting rights — a body of law that shaped real property concepts well into the early modern period.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary shelf source for this term in the Law Mind corpus. Burrill defines it tersely — "L. Fr. To drive back" — with a citation to the Year Books (Yearb. M. 11 Hen. VI. 4), placing it squarely in the Lancastrian period of the early fifteenth century. This is consistent with the height of Law French Year Book production.
No other major historical legal dictionaries in the standard shelf — not Bouvier, not Black's early editions — appear to have carried this term, which reflects both its narrow technical function and the degree to which Year Book vocabulary was already receding from active legal use by the time those works were compiled. Burrill, drawing more heavily on English common law antiquities than his American counterparts, preserved it where others omitted it.
The citation to 11 Henry VI (circa 1432–1433) places this usage in a period when Law French pleading was still conventional but English was increasingly present in legal records. Researchers should note that Burrill does not expand on context or doctrine — the entry is definitional only — and the Year Book passage itself must be consulted for any substantive legal meaning beyond the bare act of driving back.
Jurisdictional Note
Rechaser is an English common law term with no American legal history. It does not appear in colonial or early republic American sources except by way of historical reference to English authority. Researchers in American legal history can treat it as an English-only term for practical purposes.